Cairn PS5 Proves Much More Impressive Than Just a Realistic Version of Only Up | Push Square

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When you work as a journalist, you train yourself to not be too effusive about a preview build of a game. We’re not fanboys, we’re not here to hype your product. We’re professionals. We are here to play your game and evaluate it. That said, by the time we finished playing Cairn and left the tiny booth in the French pavilion in the business area of Gamescom, we found ourselves grinning ear to ear like an idiot and excitedly messaging friends that they had to try to organise appointments to play Cairn before the end of the show.

On paper, Cairn is very simple. There is a mountain. You are going to climb it. However, unlike the spat viral climbing games like Only Up! that are going around, Cairn is a simulation. It wants to emulate the feeling, the stress, the tension, the relief, and the reward of real rock climbing — and having only climbed the first summit, we’re glad to report it does just that and then some.

For a game seeking to be something of a simulation, Cairn’s controls are devilishly simple. On flat land, you walk around like any other third-person game. However, walk up to a vertical surface and press square and the ambient music fades away, leaving only the wind and your left hand being controlled by your left analogue stick. Find a hold you can grab onto (easily identifiable thanks to the game’s fantastic-looking cell shading) and press square again to grab it. Now you are in control of your right hand: find a handhold for that too, press square, grab on. Now do the same with your right foot. And now your left foot. And now climb that mountain.

There are more mechanics than that obviously; the whole game is a systems drive and the devs outlined that when climbing, there are no manually created animations. — it's all simulated. Instead, it was the rock face itself that got the attention of The Game Bakers as those potential routes (and dead ends) were all designed by hand. This means if the game thinks you're overextending or putting too much weight on